Total Invested: $408.20 (47 websites)

I didn’t buy any domain names this month for the sniper project. In fact, I think I only bought 1 domain name the whole month and just bought a .info on a spur of the moment thing. I actually bought it to help figure out a little better how to work my Christmas authority sites.

Amazon: $701.30 (Total: $1794.39)

The odd thing here is that on the 25th of April, I actually started making this post. I was just going to add in the numbers at the end of the month. Well things changed. The first 20 days of this month I was flying and was above average. I was going to fly past the $500 goal I set last month, which when I initially thought of that number I thought it was a little high for me. Starting on the 20th of the month, I had like a week of below average and slower days.

What I initially wrote was that I did beat the $500 mark (I was expecting maybe $500-$540), but that I was disappointed because I was on track for much better numbers earlier in the month. But I ended up finishing up the month very strong. On the 28th I had my first day of $102.04 in commissions (after selling $1,457.44 worth of items). Breaking the hundred dollar day is always a nice feeling for a program, even though it’s not remotely close to daily averages. I remember when I broke the hundred barrier with Clickbank and Copeac (my CPA), it’s always a nice feeling.

For May, I really want to set a goal number of $900, but I’m not going to. I’m going to aim at $800. And the reason for that is that I can’t get past the fact that this might be a fluke month. The way I see it is that if it is a fluke, I should hopefully be able to squeeze in at $800. If not, I have no problem making extra money.

I’m still stuck in the 7% commission tier at Amazon, though I entered into it the earliest time for a month, so that is a plus. I doubt I’ll even come close to breaking out of that tier and into 7.5% in May. But I’m hoping I can in the future.

I have some hefty goals though. I want Amazon up to $1000/mth before Summer (before July). And this is sort of tricky because the summer is always slow and it really depends on a lot of factors. People are on the computer less, which means you have less time to advertise to them and they’re less likely to buy. I’d be very happy if I could hold onto a full grand each month during this time with Amazon, but I guess we’ll see what happens.

Adsense: $104.46 (Total: $521.03)

This is pretty much the same as it was last month, so nothing to really say. I haven’t been pushing Adsense and I’m actually second thinking it now. There are a lot of things going on with Google and them going on full assault. I was actually curious why Grizzly’s site wasn’t in the top 10 anymore for all his MMO links. Well, he had a post toward the end of April explaining why. And there was Ben from Make Money Online with SEO that had a ton of his sites indexed from one of his Adsense accounts.

The only reason why I have Adsense(AS) earnings is that I’m trying to diversify, which is extremely important. I ran into problems starting out having all my eggs in one basket and I’m not going to repeat it. It’s this desire to diversify that has pushed me closer to the AS system, but I’ve still been apprehensive about it. I haven’t gone full steam ahead at it and I’ve exhibited paranoia with it.

I was under the impression that the most likely punishment that you’d receive from AS would be a banning and I can deal with a banning. At $100/mth, it isn’t that big of a deal. With them deindexing sites, I’m actually pretty afraid now. A banning is no big deal, but having your sites lost like that is a slap in the face. At least if I was making several thousand with them each month I could have at least saved something in a bank account. But not at a $100.

I’m officially bowing out of AS, which I’ll probably do over the next month. I was planning on pushing into AS hard after I got my Amazon above a thousand, but I’m just going to bow out of it. I’ll move onto Clickbank and Commission Junction probably.

I know some of you are thinking “don’t give up. Just make clean sites that aren’t obvious MFAs.” I just can’t get around the point that I am trying to make money with AS. That’s really the point, I’m trying to profit with it. A site about coffee tables can’t be a friendly user site for reading. I just can’t do it. And even if I do, what’s stopping the big G from banning me anyway? If they don’t like something from the traffic or if I write something wrong; BAM, I’m done. It doesn’t matter if the site is thin or thick.

I’ve written in the past about Google on my old blog and I want to point out two posts in particular; my Google Analytics (Nov. 18 2008) post and my Adsense Sucks (June 29 2008) post. Even though they’re old posts, they still hold true and contain all the same opinions I believe.

Just to sum up why Google will always be quick with the ban hammer on AS is that it has a gambling business model. It’s pay per click. That’s the equivalent of paying someone to come in you store. It’s not necessarily good for business. Contrast that with pay per sale, where someone actually has to buy for you to make money.

Consider the abuses of the two different systems. With AS you’re going to have fraud when someone disingenuously clicks on an ad and is completely not interested in what they click. When I use the word fraud, it’s not legally fraud. For a program like Amazon, fraud is when someone uses a stolen credit card. This is actually real fraud and is criminal. The system that faces more “fraud” is the system that pays you for someone clicking on a link.

The amount of abuse that Google has to deal with must be unimaginable. The crap from people that click the ads, to the spammers that autocreate thousands of blogs within a period of an hour. As long as these people exist, Google will always have a quick ban hammer. They’ll even wipe out good people or those that are right on the border between good and bad. They don’t have any desire to be fair because fair means they’re losing money.

In the end, AS advertisers have to profit. THEY HAVE TO PROFIT. Pay per click is a failed business model if advertisers don’t make a profit because they’re not coming back without that profit. And the overzealous ban hammer is the means to insure that profit is created.

The other point I want to make is similar to the point in the Google Analytics post I made. Google is an information beast and just keeps digging, digging and digging some more for information. The problem that people fail to see is that Google has the power to use information against you. They can deindex you, which is what they are apparently doing now with your AS footprint on each site.

Like I said in the Analytics post, I don’t want Google to know shit about my sites. I don’t want them know what people are doing or clicking on. I don’t want them knowing where my traffic comes from. I don’t want them to know shit because Google views me as an enemy. Let’s just cut through the shit, Google hates us because purposely move up the ranks of Google to make cash. That’s all we’re doing. They hate us, and with the right information they can fuck with us.

Okay, that is enough of that topic…

The point is that I’m stepping away from AS and just moving onto other greener pastures. I’m not the biggest fan of Clickbank because I think they’re payment processor is outdated, but they can’t deindex my sites. Plus, the weekly direct deposits are a nice touch.

On Sniper Sites

There was something that I noticed about my sniper sites. Well, at least some of them. In April, I really went back and started spending time on some of my better performing (traffic and/or profit potential) sites. I started to add in more content and do back linking. And I started to notice some trends with some of the sites.

I’ve created an extensive look at it on my main blog area titled Sniper Sites to Authority Sites. I went into a little more on that page, so you can read about it there. My objective with my sniper sites was to select one keyword, get a keyword domain and dominate that keyword. That was my only goal.

What I noticed is that sites that have a more diverse range of keyword traffic (a smaller percentage coming from the main keyword) the better the site was and the more authority it has. When I added content (which happens to be static HTML and no pinging) the pages indexed on the front page or on the second page.

Conversely, the sniper sites that were doing well for the main keyword, but little else (majority of search traffic for one term), the less authority the site had and the harder it was to get new pages to rank. It took forever for the pages to index and when they did they were well beyond the 100th position in quotes.

The point, which is obvious, is that your site needs to have that diverse range of keywords coming in. It’s probably better to target a wide range of smaller keywords, while still pounding away at your main keyword, to really make a site with authority.

This was a nice revelation to see. Some of the sites are getting closer to some major niche keywords, so I’m excited about that.

I should also point out that a lot of my sites still need work, even though I’m spending my time working on the ones with potential right now. I’ll eventually get around to all this. Building 46 sniper sites is easy, but building them into bigger sites is a lot more work lol.

I’m actually trying to think of all the things I wanted to talk about and put it in this one monthly post, but I can’t think of anything else to mention. Hopefully next month, I’ll have something to post on the Christmas authority sites I’m working on.

Total Invested: $408.20 (6 more domains)

And I guess you want a monthly breakdown of how much I’m earning with these sites. I usually just gave you a runnning total of how much I’ve earned, but I’m going to give you a month and total this time.

Amazon: $350.41 (Total: $1093.09) On 35 sites

When it comes to Amazon, I don’t feel like I’m earning what I should with it for the amount of time invested. But the thing about Amazon is that the income keeps growing each month and I think it is much more stable. If you look at a program like Clickbank, you could get 30 sales a month at $33/sale to make a grand a month. But there are variations and getting 20 sales in a month is a big change in what you make. Where as Amazon you need a high volume of sales to actually earn something that is going to pay the bills.

For this reason I think that Amazon is good. I think it is quite stable from an income point of view and that is something that I can really appreciate. Anyone that has been doing this long enough knows that fluctuations are just part of the game, but having a nice stable source is really a solid base to work with.

This was the very first month that I actually hit the 7.0% commission tier. The way Amazon works is that they show you how many sales you have got and how many sales have been shipped. They pay you on shipped items and that is what counts toward moving up the tiers. I had enough commissions last month for it, but they didn’t get all shipped and I missed out on it. lol.

My goal in April is to get my Amazon earnings to $500/mth. I just need to keep pushing traffic through the affiliate links and keep hoping for good things. I won’t pass through to the 7.5% tier next month to reach that goal. I eventually want to get this up to a $1000/mth and the sooner the better. Essentially that is all I try to do with programs now. I work at them until I get them to around $1000/mth and move on to another program to do the same. It’s my way of diversifying.

Adsense: $106.77 (Total: $416.57) On 8 sites*

I put an asterisk by the sites because I recently converted two Amazon sites to Adsense at the end of the month. They weren’t converting and some ass emailed me asking to buy one of them. I decided I better put it on Adsense to see what it is capable of earning. My Adsense earnings aren’t anything special. I really don’t have any interest in Adsense. Making more than a hundred in a month means I’ll get money wired to my bank account, but that’s about it.

I’m just a little scared to use sniper sites for Adsense because my sites are pretty thin and Google might think they’re MFA (well they are, I don’t make sites for shits and giggles). I *HEARD* that Adsense doesn’t really do an audit of your sites until you’re making about $100/day ($3000/mth). So making a $1000/mth fits in a nice safe range when audits are concerned. Still, I’m pretty reluctant with the program. I might continue to just dick around with it and slowly build it up on the side.

Total Month: $457.18 (Overall Total: $1509.66)  On 43 Sites*

I do have more than 43 sites invested into this little sniper project, but some of them are not monetized yet. Since they’re not monetized I didn’t feel like adding them into the earning statistics. I did add them into how much I invested though.

I guess while I’m still updating people on things, I should update you on things unrelated to the sniper site project. I mentioned in a post not to long ago that I’m working on Christmas Authority Sites. This was actually quite interesting because I’ve been making a little bit of money with them already. You can look at the post I gave on Christmas Authority Sites to understand the method to my madness, but it has been an interesting run so far.

I’ve found that you’ll rank for lots of shit and most of them are duds. Most will not even bring you a drip of traffic, but you’ll hit something that does get traffic. It doesn’t take anymore work then the posts that fail, so it’s nice. The best part is that when you hit the traffic, it’s something that is going to convert. Even though I’m not getting a high volume of traffic it seems to be doing decent for new sites.

A few days ago I picked up a few domains to get this a try with Clickbank as the affiliate program. I actually just wanted to get one site, but I have a rule about domains name. If I find a keyword domain I want and .net and .org (and even .com) are available, I have to buy them all. This happens because I’ve bought a .net or .org, seen it perform well and went to go back to get the their extension and it being gone. Pain in the ass! But that is an aside.

I wanted to play with Clickbank in a very minor way. As you should all know, I think Clickbank Sucks because I made a nice little blog about it. I still think they’re pretty much incompetent, but I miss the tiny trickle of sales I was getting. Since I stopped actively promoting CB I was still making sales. I’d get anywhere from 1-3 sales a week on average and with weekly payments to my bank account it was nice to see $50-100 popping into my bank account every week. It’s not a lot of money, but something that pays for groceries.

Anyway, I wanted to get my sales back to something like that and this type of site will be like that. When I used to play with CB and was making decent money with it, I was an bum marketer (which is shit). I’m going to do it with the least amount of work to see what I can earn from it. I’ll keep you posted on how that works out too. Just a note, I’ll have two of these sites on two different webhosts, which makes my sites a lot more strategic when it comes to ranking.

Let’s see, what else to update you guys on. I bought 4 sites on Sunday to help with my CPAs. I haven’t really talked about CPAs on this blog. Might be something to talk about in the future, but not now. I can’t remember if I mentioned on this site that I bought a .info domain. After hearing loads of talk on this and how they’re punished, I thought I’d give it a try. I actually found a 1 word (5 letter) .info domain available for some piece of clothing. From my experience so far it is working like a normal domain. I don’t appear to be punished or anything like that. Granted, I haven’t played with enough .info domains to really know, but so far they’re just like any other domain.

The only real concern I have right now is that I’m juggling 50+ active domains right now and I find it a bit overwhelming at times. Like, I have a lot of domains and most of them are sitting idle and earning. Meaning I built them up and they just sit to earn. They don’t need the active attention, just a little love now and then. But with 50+ active sites that need love now and need content now is overwhelming. I’m definitely going to sit down and write a post on this blog for organizing this many active sites.

I guess that’s all for now. Just an FYI to those that read to this point. Some assclown left a comment on the blog about how one of my posts was a million words long and asked me to summarize it. Fuck off. The posts are long for a reason. If I had ads, you would of clicked on them already (which is the point).

The idea behind getting the double listing is really quite simple. Let’s say that I was trying to rank for “red pants” and I have a blog post titled “The Best Red Pants of 2010″ and it ranks first for the term “red pants”. If I want to get the double listing I just make another post that has “red pants” in the title (obviously not the same title) and link both the posts together using “red pants” as the anchor. That is what you’re supposed to do based on Grizzlies post on the subject. Though that post is old and I can tell outdated.

Out of 41 attempted sites I tried to get a double listing for, only two of them have it. It would of been three, but one of my double listings disappeared. Out of the only two that actually got a double listing, one of them is double listing a page I didn’t attempt to do it for. So I suppose you could call that a natural double listing, but it doesn’t inspire hope that this particular method works.

What I’m Thinking

I have a little theory on how this must work, though I can’t fully back it up with 41 sites to verify it, but I’ll say it anyways. I think the linking pattern is something that works and I know it works because I’ve tried it with other sites. The easier it is to rank for a keyword, the easier it is to double list it. If you go after a very weak long tail keyword you can easily double list it. If you need to verify that for yourself, just try ranking for a keyword that has absolutely no competition. If you need an example of such a keyword try, “pink bucket for turkey”.

Seriously, just dick around with keywords like this and get them to double list. Something that I need to do, but haven’t is figuring out how to get a double listing twice. Let me explain what I mean, let’s say I have the two pages I want to double list…

“pink bucket for turkey” and “new pink bucket for turkey”

Now I can get to the point where if I type “pink bucket for turkey” into Google I’ll have a double listing and the second listing will be the “new pink bucket for turkey”. What I want to know how to do is get that double listing, but also if someone types in “new pink bucket for turkey” in Google, I’ll also get a double listing. That’s something I haven’t figured out yet. Feel free to dick around with that and see if you can figure that out.

The reason why I think these weak keywords are easy to double rank for is the fact that both pages need to have the ability to rank in the top 10 on their own. This is easy to see when you’re going after “pink bucket for turkey” because you don’t need any backlinks for it and absolute shit sites will rank for it. The same is true for authority sites because all new pages created have a little juice and power to them. If you have an article that ranks in the top 10 for a keyword, make another with the same keyword and you’ll probably double list. You don’t even need to link them together either.

When it comes to my sniper sites it is a little different. They’re not authority sites because they’re simply not big enough and have enough links, but they’re ranking for their selected term. I’ve built up the links to the secondary page that I want to double list and they’re not all doing that good (obviously when 2/41 double list). But I guess all I can do is wait to see what happens as I let them sit for a while and hopefully they will work.

Conclusion

Whether you can get this to work or not is irrelevant. When you do end up getting that double listing you get a lot of extra traffic for a keyword. And that is the big bonus. It doesn’t take much extra work. It’s just one page of content and building links to it. Since you should be building links to all your content, it should take no extra time.

And how much extra traffic will you get. Most people will assume that they’ll get a tiny percentage extra. If 5th position gets 3% and that is what you end up getting with your double listing, people will assume that they’ll get an extra 3% of total searches. The fact is that you’re going to see a significant jump. You’ll probably see a 30-40% jump in the amount of traffic that you’re getting from the search term. The reason is that the double listing stands out for both people and produces a better CTR.

Since it requires absolutely no extra work to orient your site to get double listings then you shouldn’t have a problem trying it. Just do it as you start building sites. As usual, start with the easy stuff to rank. When you get in the top 10 for a keyword, just try for a double listing. And just keep going with new keywords. It doesn’t have to be a difficult process.

I guess we might as well get to the money right now. In my post about niche sites, I mentioned the total of $319.71 being earned since I started into the sniper sites. That was posted on November 27th, so I thought I’d do an update for all my readers.

Total Invested:  $354.20
Total Return: $652.98

So we can all chant yippie, I’m finally in positive territory, even though no where near where I’d like it to be. I think we really need to consider the fact that I just finished doing backlinks to all my sniper sites last night. Some of them had only one page of content and no monitization (which I promptly fixed). Every single one of the 41 websites had at least one new fresh page of keyword rich content that was somewhere between 500-1000 words.

The results of that work won’t be felt for a while now. I won’t expect anything for at least a month from some of the sites, so I’m not too worried about it. As of right now, I have 5 Adsense sites and the rest are Amazon. The majority of my earnings are from Amazon as well.

I only have a few sites that are in the money spot (top 3 at Google). I have a lot of them hanging at position 4, so I’m sure they’ll push up as the link juice flows through over the next few weeks. I should also say that I picked up an additional two domains, which are not listed in the above numbers. I’m going to throw them in the category of wave 3, even though there’s just two domains. They’re following the same idea. One of them is in a niche that I expect to get hot in the next few years, so we’ll see how interesting that goes.

The other domain has to do with another topic that I want to really work into.

Dominating the Top 10

I used to think the key to dominating a niche was getting the top spot for various keywords in the niche. What I’m trying to do now is dominate the top 10 positions of a keyword. This other domain I bought was the same keyworded domain as a domain in wave 1. I had the .net, so I picked up the .org (keyword.net and keyword.org). I have both sites on different hosting accounts (different IPs) and I have them ranking 4th and 5th position in Google. It used to be 3rd and 5th, but there has been a little movement lately.

I did use two different hosting accounts for the domains just so I’d have a unique IP located in a different city. I really don’t know how suspicious Google would get if keyword.net and keyword.org were ranked in the top 10 from the same IP#. If you’ve tested this please comment and let me know.

For the same keyword I’ve also created a hub (from hubpages) and backlinked the hell out of that. It’s taking an abnormal amount of time to get indexed, but once it does I’m sure it will spring into the top 10. I’ll just keep doing that with different sites until I actually fill in the top 10. And let me tell you how useful it is to have a bunch of sites fully backlinked in a niche. The keyword.net for the site was bought first and was built, backlinked and ranked for a while. The keyword.org site is a position 5 with only one backlink from my .net site. Once I do take the top 10 over, I’ll just start going into related keywords and take over the top 10 for them. And that is how to make cash or at least how I plan to make it.

That is going to be my next little project with the sniper sites. Any site that is ranked in the top 10, I will get an additional two sites that are mine to rank in the top 10. I can do this a number of ways. I can buy a domain for the keyword. So if I have keyword.net, I’ll pick up keyword.org (if available). I’ll probably go the free route with a hubpage or something like that.

Double Google Positions

Okay, now this is something that I want to do. It will allow me to occupy an extra top 10 position without actually having to hold any new site. It’s where you have your regular listing and an indented listing below it. Well, according to Griz all you have to do is link two pieces of content together with the same keyword. I linked backed to my old sniper sites post from this post I’m doing right now. What I’ll do is go back to that old post, edit it and link to this one. That is supposedly what needs to be done to create a double listing. I want to do that too.

I guess this is something that I’ll have to get done and the date to put on this will be tough. I’m predicting the best I can is two sites a day, with two extra properties each and with a double listing. Hmmm, Well, I’m heading to the Dominican Republic in March. I want to get that all done before I have to go there.

Well, I guess that is enough for this post. Just thought I’d tell you about the sites and that I’m in a positive return now, so that is a good thing. Keep at it and keep making cash.

I’m sure this has happened to a lot of you. You go to Google’s keyword tool and do a little keyword research. You find a great keyword and decide that you’re going to rank for it. You buy a keyword rich domain, write content for it and build links over several months. One day in the future you’re checking on the progress of the site and you see that you finally pushed into the top 10. You take a peak at your stats and notice you’re not getting much traffic for your keyword. So you head back to the keyword tool and check the traffic volume. What do you see? A low number like a 1000/month.

The problem is that these keyword tools aren’t necessarily accurate. Sure they can be extremely accurate and other times they’re not. The only way you can get the real numbers is to rank for them and see what comes in. That really isn’t a good answer for us that are looking to make cash from as many sites as we can.

This is where EZA can help us. EZA is an authority site and that allows articles to rank very high for no backlinks. The odd thing is that EZA actually shares the view count at the end of each article. This tells us exactly how much traffic an article gets. Most people that write for directories understand the concept of keywords and using them, so you can reverse engineer articles.

EZA ranks in the top 10 for these articles, but it isn’t a strong ranking. I laugh anytime I see an article directory in the top 10. Seriously, you should be laughing too because you can easily outrank it. This is what I mean. Why be a bitch to EZA writing all the time for them, when you can just reverse engineer all the articles on their site and take it.

I have to admit that today I wasn’t planning on posting on this subject. I made a post over at DP in a thread about someone banned from EZA. I said that this was the best thing that ever happened to them and that this directory was a crutch for most people. Some guy made a cocky one line reply like “yeah $5000 a month is a crutch” or something along those lines. I find that incredibly funny to post on a forum.

When I use the word “crutch” it refers to slowing you down making cash online. You can’t run if you have crutches, but it doesn’t suggest that you can get to places. But it’s still a crutch even if you make $5000/mth passively. And I’ll prove it.

If you’re making $5000/mth article marketing we have to stipulate a few things.

1. You’re writing a shit load of articles each and everyday OR
2. You have a lot of articles ranking in Google pulling traffic

If you’re in category 1 than you’re just doing bum marketing. It’s not different then doing double shifts at McDonald’s everyday. I’m sure if employees were allowed to double shift everyday they’d make good money. I’ve already addressed this in my post titled the Biggest Mistake in Affiliate Marketing.

The second scenario is the one that I want to address for this post. The idea that the articles are getting a significant amount of search engine traffic and that is what makes a nice passive income. This is great and everything, but it disturbs me when people think that it is good. Here’s why:

EZA Articles Aren’t Strong

I know that the articles are going to rank in the top 10 with absolutely no keywords, but that happens only on keywords that are relatively weak to begin with. A little bit of work with your own site and you can out rank them. It’s not like the articles are invincible or something. Every time I see some sort of directory in the top 10, I laugh. I laugh because I know that I can rank for it with virtually no work.

It’s so damn easy that a keyword rich domain would be enough for you to get the top 10. A few backlinks and you’re golden. Obviously getting your site in the top 10 at Google is more important than EZA in the top 10 because …

EZA Only Gives You 30% of the Traffic

Gurus will tell you that a good respectable click through rate on your articles is 30%. In other words, 70% of the traffic goes to the directory for their profit. The CTR on your articles will generally fluctuate though, so it is hard to say. You may only get 10% on average.

If your site is in the top 10 getting the traffic than you’re getting 100% of the traffic. Hmmm, 30% vs 100%. I don’t know about you, but I prefer 100% of the traffic. If the 30% coming from EZA is helping you make five grand a month, than 100% would make you $16,667/mth. If you were looking how to make cash online, which would you prefer? I know, which one that I want.

I can hear the objections now…

But But But this is a lot easier than making new sites

That is true. It does take a lot more work to make a site and see if it works. You have to build links, make content, monetize it, etc. Well, if you’re writing articles you’re going to have to drive your traffic to something. Can you sell your articles VALUE (IE: ranking) on a directory? No. Can you sell your sites that are ranked? Yes. I suppose this is the difference between renting and buying.

I know the deal though. I get it. This is really how to make cash online for beginners and I agree with that. But that doesn’t make it right or something that you should continue doing. There is something that is a lot easier for beginners to use. Something that is much more accurate. Much more fun and makes much more money…

Reverse Engineering EZA

The people on EZA that are making a nice passive income of $5000/mth, I’m gunning for you. I’m literally gunning for you now. It’s nothing personal. It’s not unethical. It’s business and I’m taking you out. At this point you should know exactly what to do, but I understand some of you don’t know how to read between the lines. Here are the most important pieces of information I listed above…

• EZA lists the number of views an article receives at the bottom of the page
• Even though EZA articles make it into the top 10, they’re weak and easy to beat
• 100% traffic going to your own site is much more valuable than 30% coming from EZA

What I’m talking about is going to EZA and looking through the articles. Find the ones that are getting the traffic and dissect them. For the most part it should be relatively easy to identify the keyword of the article. It will be in the title and all through out the article. You can search the term at Google to verify that it is ranking and you can check the search volume at the keyword tool.

Okay, A Walk Through

I guess the best place to show you this method is with a walk through. There are a number of ways to find articles with high visit counts, including a Google function way. I’m not going to show you how to do that one. I’m sure if you learn the syntax methods of search engines you might be able to figure it out.

But you can just do the most obvious thing and that is going to an article and looking at the most viewed. For this walk through I’m looking at an article in the mobile computing section. I’ll point out that this was completely random. I clicked on the first article on the front page of EZA.

Using the technology niche probably wasn’t the smartest choice since this is a niche that has a social aspect of it. People like to talk about their laptops and gadgets, but it’s still good. Take a look at the one I highlighted. It appeared to me as the one that was the most “webmastered”, if that is a word. But you can take a look at the views and see that it has a ton. Actually EZA is fucked right now because this article is older than 90 days.

This article has been up for around 20 months now. That means that it is getting roughly 1300 visitors a month. That’s not a ton of visitors, but it’s enough to make it worth wild. If 1300 visitors a month over a year can make over $10 (cost of a domain) than you’re profitable. Obviously you want to make more, which you should be with 1300 visitors a month.

So what is the keyword? The keyword stuck out like a sore thumb for me. It’s “free laptop for students”. I went and type that in Google (without quotes) and it comes up in third position. It came up in first for Google Canada.

Click to Enlarge

The last step in this whole thing is to take a look at the keyword in Google’s keyword tool. This is where we can see if it is actually the keyword that is the driving force for the article. Inevitably it is the keyword that is going to help you make real cash online.

Click to enlarge

I just noticed I took the wrong screen for the keyword. Laptops is plural in this one. But doesn’t matter. Same amount of searches. As you can see it gets around 2400 searches a month. It’s not something that I’d personally go after. I don’t think 2400 is a enough for me. Though, you might dig through the niche and see a lot of other related keywords that get 1000′s a month too. You could rank for all of them and have a site getting a hundred unique visitors a day. I’m not going to investigate this particular niche for you because I just want to demonstrate how you can use and abuse EZA for keywords.

For the keyword “free laptop for students”, it’s something that you can can go after. I actually didn’t document this to show you how easy it could be to rank. I just did this spur of the moment thing. So if you’re planning on going after the keyword, it is all yours. No one else is in the niche and since EZA ranks 3rd you should have no problem over taking it.

What if you can’t figure out the keyword? This happens a lot. The article gets a lot of views, but I can’t figure out the keyword right away. I’ll admit, some of the articles are a mystery. I can’t figure out how they got that many views because I can’t find the keyword. It’s life. They could be an abuser of the system sending traffic to it, but I don’t know. I do have a method you can take advantage of to find the keyword. Just use SEO Quake Firefox addon. Just click on the Page info option and you’ll get a screen like this:

Click to enlarge

There is a lot more analysis done than just what is listed there. But essentially what it is doing is checking the keyword density of words on the page. If the page has traffic than it will probably have some keyword with a high density. It doesn’t necessarily have to be in the title.

This is one keyword that I found in around 120 seconds of searching this directory. Is it a perfect keyword? Probably not. But it is something that can help you earn cash online and it demonstrates the entire exercise of how you can get good PROVEN keywords on EZA. And that’s what you want. You want PROVEN KEYWORDS that you know work.

I could end the post like this, but I would have only taught you how to abuse EZA. I want to show you how to SCREW EZA.

Dominate the Keyword Then Dominate the Niche

When I say dominate the keyword, I don’t simply mean get to position 1 at Google. It’s a matter of getting position one, two, three and all the way to 10. Of course there is no guarantee that you can get them all, but ideally that is what you should be aiming for. Don’t get me wrong. Getting position one or two or whatever the hell EZA was ranked at. You’re going to get 100% of the traffic instead of 30%. But you can always have more. In my Make Cash Online with sniper sites post I pointed out how much the top spot at Google gets and it’s not that exciting.

Here they are again for your convenience:

1. 42.30%
2. 11.92%
3. 8.44%
4. 6.03%
5. 4.86%
6. 3.99%
7. 3.37%
8. 2.98%
9. 2.83%
10. 2.97%

As you can see the first spot has the most (obviously), but it’s only 42% of the total search volume.  If you get the first spot of Google for an awesome keyword than congrats, but that is only 42%. You can get much more off that traffic. If you got to position one than you can obviously get 2, 3, 4, etc.

Before you go dominating crazy, you want to make sure whether it is worth wild. Make your first site and take over the position that the EZA article holds. See what happens. If it is profitable than your goal should be to have every single position on the front page.

You won’t be able to do it with the same site though. I’m not even sure if you can do it from all the same host (same IP). I haven’t tested that though. You can always get a blogger blog, hubpages, squidoo, etc to rank in the top 10 and take up positions. While you’re taking over the top 10, you’re pushing EZA off the front page. That is how they screw them.

Reverse Engineer Your Own Articles on EZA

I hope you guys are aware that EZA does share search engine stats for your articles. They only give you the top 5 search terms over a month period. But that is usually enough to give you a rough idea of what you need to know.

Just go into your articles where you get a list of them. Click on the views number. It will be a link that you can click. It will take you to a page where you can see all the search engine traffic over the month. One thing to understand is that the numbers they give aren’t accurate at all. For example, I have an article that gets like 3000 views a month. That’s roughly 100 a day, yet it lists like 10 visits for my top keyword. I know that is wrong. The important aspect of this feature is the actual keyword. You can verify for yourself that you’re ranked for it and you can check with Google’s keyword tool to see the volume.

There is absolutely no reason why you should have a 3000 views a month article on EZA. I know I shouldn’t have lol. That particular article is in first position too. I am in the works of taking over that position. I want the top 5 at least.

I hope this post has been enlightening. This explains how to make cash online by screwing EZA and it rocks. All the guess work is taken out of the equation because you can see the views. Mmmm mmmm GOOD!

I thought I should do a little case study to demonstrate how this works. I spent a few hours this week coming up with some keywords. I found a few that were getting 10,000 searches a month and EZA was ranking for it. Yeah, I’ll take over them and laugh all the way to the bank.

I’m particularly disappointed with the Warrior Forum and the people on there. Don’t get me wrong. There was a lot of upset people, but there seemed to also be the ass suckers. The ones that were glorifying this as something good. It is something good, but to who?

When you get right down to it we all have different loyalties. Google is at war with us too. Google owes it’s loyalty to it’s visitors. Even though they make their money with advertising, they still need people to search. And that means providing the best possible results. Google is at war with us because we game it; because we market; because we don’t have the intention of giving things away, but to convert a buyer.

Where does EZA’s loyality lie? Their loyality lies with keeping Google happy (which includes search results and Adsense) and it’s visitors. I’m starting this post like this to point out that it is EZA’s prerogative to do this, but you have to understand it from an objective point of view.

The point is that EZA’s loyality is not you, but their loyality is contrary to your benefit. Remember that. Don’t ever forget it.

That is what pisses me off about the douchebags on forums saying this is good. It’s good for EZA’s benefit. Who doesn’t want nice high quality articles for free? I want some. Most of the people that are praising this move have a lack of anonymity. They have their username on the Warrior Forum as their actual name. Nothing boils my blood more than Bev Clement. Here cocky attitude and condecending attitude make me sick. This is from a person that not to long ago had a thread on the forum looking for donations because she was in trouble.  Finally after thousands have been donated we find out that she couldn’t pay rent on her little trip to Hong Kong. But I digress.

Here is why I think the move by EZA is contrary to our benefit:

What the fuck is a “quality article”?

Everyone keeps saying ‘well all you have to do is write quality articles and you won’t have a problem.’ That’s excellent advice. It’s just about as esoterically vague as ‘work smarter, not harder’.

No one has defined quality to me. And I mean not in a past tense way. An example of past tense would be the reader likes it than it’s quality. It’s past tense because the article needs to accepted and read by the reader first before quality is viewed.

That means there has to be criteria in place of objectives that must be met to be “quality”. What are they? EZA will never ever tell you them because frankly they don’t have the first fuckin’ clue what they are.

My point is that they don’t give the first flying fuck about “quality articles”. They are at war with affiliate marketers. You can bet your ass that the subject and where your landing page goes will have a much more direct effect on what determines “quality” of that article.

And I can prove it.

I was recently downgraded at EZA. After nearly 3000 articles with them, I was moved from Platinum to Basic PLUS. I didn’t even get an email telling me why. After that all my articles get rejected, so obviously I stopped completely.

The big thing that the word “quality” implies is that the information is quality. This is where the argument of quality articles will die. EZA doesn’t verify information in articles.  It doesn’t have the time, money or resources to do it. Quality other than the information provided in the article could only come from spelling, grammar, punctuation and article length. Oh and from my thesis, the writers intent *cough* marketing.

So how do they determine what is a “good” article and one that deserves to be rejected? I could write long coherent articles on how push ups cure migraine headaches. I can articulate it in a very smart way and explain it with a very convincing physiological theory. The article is crap and doesn’t help the reader in anyway, but I’m sure EZA would eat it up.

That’s the whole point. There is no way to determine what is good and bad in the eyes of EZA. That means the process isn’t equally applied to all members and it also means that some writers are going to be targets. And since they’re at war with affiliate marketers, you’re always a target to be picked on.

Old Articles Are Being Revisited

The whole reason for this crack down is all about Google. I’ve seen the results of EZA decline over the last year and I expect the trend to continue that way. This is how EZA plans to stop this and get their shit together. It isn’t enough for them to simply start enforcing a policy from this day forward, but they’re going to start applying the new standards to old articles. “In the past, we’ve grandfathered existing articles in when new quality levels are set, except when a live article is edited, today’s standard is applied to that content.” – EZA blog.

If you’ve written articles that meet the “quality” of today’s standards (whatever that is) your articles are fine and it shouldn’t be a big deal – for now.  6 Months from now they could tighten the bolts again and some of your articles are dropped. I don’t know, but that’s something that you have to think about it.

When I work, I expect my work to provide long lasting results, but you could lose it. Seriously, I could wake up tomorrow and my account be banned because my past ACCEPTED articles were not up today’s standards. You have to think of that shit.

There’s a point where it’s just too much work to satisfy the demands of someone else and I don’t feel like satisfying them anymore.

Your Articles Aren’t Ethically Used

A big selling point for using EZA is that other webmasters will take your articles and put them on their site. They’ll use your resource box, so that you get traffic and a backlink. It sounds like the perfect plan on paper.

Here is the reality: No site that has any valuable qualities is going to use your articles. I’ve never ever seen EZA articles on a site that would provide a quality backlink in any way. Do you see me going to EZA looking for articles to put on this blog? No. Even if there was a quality article on EZA, I would be interested in writing my own article on the subject and putting it on this blog. If I have a valuable site I’m not going to just play a game of copy and paste with my readers. I want to take care of them.

Obviously your articles are getting published on sites because you can see it count in your EZA stats. My stats say I have over 6000 published on other sites. I’m sure if you’ve been looking at your traffic stats you’re well aware of the quality of site that links back to you.

Most of them are spammy piece of shit sites. They have no traffic, they have spammy backlinks and they’re probably part of a blog farm. I know Google is in a tough spot here. Obviously, site owners can’t control who is linking to their site. But on the other hand it has to stop blog farms. After enough of these spammy sites use your articles, you’re just getting viewed in a negative manner by Google.

Some of the sites will bring you traffic, but not a lot. I don’t want to call these links spammy, but they’re definitely not quality. A lot of these sites are by people looking to build up their content really fast. That usually means they’re trying to flip the site.

There is no quality links coming to you from people using the articles on their own sites. Spam sites, bots and scrapers will go to the sites and autoblog 1000 of your articles in a few hours. Is that really something you want your sites to be a part of?

Just think of it this way. If I worked hard to build this authority site over years. I spent money on SEO companies to get it to the top. Am I going to EZA to get myself a free article? No fuckin’ way. Only people with nothing are going there.

They Want Longer Articles – They Just Won’t Say It

I think we can all recognize that they want more length. Often now when articles are being rejected they tell you in the email that you should write 450-700 word articles. The rules say 250 minimum, but we all know they’re looking for more. And like anything where you are asked to give more, they’ll just keep asking for more and more. Yes, that phenomenon is right of the book Influence.

Let’s stipulate the common definition of quality articles as a lengthy informative article (which EZA will never verify beyond length). What benefit is there to me? I can see the benefit to Chris Knight; more long tail traffic and higher Adsense CTR.

See, we’ll get lower CTR off to our site because of the length. There are a few reasons for that. It takes much more work to read through the article. It is incredibly easy to get bored. When I’m looking for information online I’m not reading a long article. I’ll look for something else and the first thing that you’ll see on EZA is an Adsense ad. Since there is so much text between the start of the article and your resource box at the bottom you’re just going to get less clicks.

Another problem that I have with lengthy quality articles is the fact that you have to give away too much. People say that this is the best way to sell. I disagree since we’re affiliate marketers. Let’s say I’m selling an ebook on curing migraine headaches. What keywords would I be writing my articles for? Cure Migraines, Cure for Migraines, etc. If I’m using that keyword in the title than I have to supply information for that. If I fill it with real solutions that work (an informative article) than why the fuck would they buy the ebook? There is a simple rule I learned when I was an adult webmaster and that was make them pay for pink. Simply put, we show them softcore to warm them up and they pay for hardcore (our sponsors). What EZA is looking for is you to provide “hardcore” type content for their site. It’s super beneficial to him and counter productive to us.

Another example on this point can be completely verified from my apartment when I was at University.  Moved in one day, hooked the TV up to the cable wire and it worked. It worked the entire time we were there. We got free cable for whatever reason. Do you think I called up the cable company and asked to purchase cable service from them? No. Why would I pay for something that I can get for free? That’s essentially what EZA wants. They want us to provide the free cable to their readers and try to sell it to them aswell.

The Rules of Creating Content for Affiliate Marketers

I put in a lot of thought on this point. You need standards for your articles or you’re just going to be a bitch. I’m sure you have standards for a mate. If you didn’t have them you’d end up with the ugliest looking person. It might sound mean, but you need standards. Here is what I came up with when you’re writing high quality articles…

• The Content is going to be beneficial for my visitors.
• The Content is going to be paid for if someone else wants it.
• The Content is going to provide a stellar backlink.
• The Content is going to send high quality traffic – not the lower end of quality.

I try to at least meet two of these. I’m sorry. EZA provides absolute SHIT when it comes to link back value. EZA also filters off the top quality to their Adsense ads and you’re left with the a small percentage of lower quality visitors (30% if you’re lucky). I’ve talked about this in detail on my rant about bum marketing.

If I’m going to work hard to create long informative quality articles than I’m putting them on my site. I have no desire to give my shit away to unappreciative pricks like Chris Knight. I will also create content for quality links, but you’re not going to get SHIT from EZA. They just give you nothing in return and your site isn’t going to be getting extra SE traffic. The boost you’ll get is very basic and if you do make it on the front page of Google you could of done it with a few blog comments, so let’s get real.

Plus 30% CTR are considered good, but I prefer to have 100% of my readers coming to my site and reading my content. Rather than filtering through a spammy looking page full of ads. Yes, it’s spammy and Google sees it regardless of their catch 22.

I think I’ve ranted enough for over 2000 words, so let’s get into some of the meat. The point of this post is to screw EZA. Let’s all drop them and do something a hell of a lot more productive with our time.

How to get REAL authority backlinks

The advice I’m going to share with you is incredibly simple and you quite possibly may have heard it before. The problem is that we easily get intimidated by it. Instead of working your ass off for a 30% CTR (which is the only benefit of EZA) why not write articles for the most authority website in your niche?

That sounds a little more intimidating.

I know that I was intimidated by this sort of thing. It left me trying to get authority backlinks other ways. I would try to write a comment on a blog or hope that an authority site would accept listing of websites. That’s the wussie way of doing things.

I know this is intimidating, but you need to open your mind up to this type of thing because it is possible. I have seen this for a while. I’m subscribed to the RSS feeds of some high authority personal finance blogs. And a lot of times they have guest bloggers and things like that to fill in the posts.

You have to understand that authority owners are busy people. The idea of someone producing them a nice piece of high quality content (I’m talking about the real definition of high quality). It works the same way as article writing because you’re going to get an about author section where you can place your link. You’ll have to use the About Author box properly because it’s an authority site.

But think of the value. You’re going to get traffic from this site. The CTR might not be the best because you can’t really sell your author space and you’ll be writing a rather long article, but you’re going to get the best backlink possible. We’re talking about the king shit backlink that all the other internet marketers are looking for.

Here’s the even bigger kicker for you guys… it’s easy. All you have to do is find the contact information on an authority site and send them an email. Obviously you’re not going to get backlinks from Amazon or anything like that, but others will.

You’re probably thinking that this is a great idea, but you have two specific objections that pop into your head:

• Why would they choose you?
• How do I write content worthy of authority sites?

Obviously there is only so many authority sites in specific niches, but despite what you think no one is doing this. I went around looking for links in a niche and emailed people. My reply rate is like 70-80% and they were favorable. I had two that were really happy that I emailed them about this and were very interested. I’m talking about sites that have been around more than a decade. We’re talking good links here. I had one that asked me if I’d be interested in doing Guest Blogging on a regular basis BEFORE they even seen my writing.

I owe all this to not being a bitch and submitting to EZA. All I did was look up sites, get contact information and just ask them. Wow that was hard. High quality backlinks for my articles for very little work. The owners of these sites want your content, so ask them.

The other objection that you have (and it’s the main reason why I didn’t start this sooner) and it was my ability to write the content worthy of their approval. I guess we can all get intimidated and we often look at our own work in the most critical way.

All you need to know is that the only difference between a regular article and a kick ass article is a little more time. You can talk about any topic with authority if you spend more time on it. Instead of pumping out articles every 10 minutes. Spend an hour and write a kick ass 1000 word article. An authority site owner will eat this stuff up. They want quality and as long as you can present your ability to write it than they won’t be able to say no.

Finding Potential Authority Sites

This is the easy part. Go to Google and type in your niche. Go through the top 20 websites that aren’t large corporations (like Amazon, Walmart, etc) and find an email address (or a contact form). If you can’t find an email address or contact information go do a whois on the domain (samspade.org) and see if there is an email listed.

Just repeat the process with secondary keywords. For example, if your niche is bodybuilding than secondary keywords would be bodybuilder workout, bodybuilding diet, etc.

Not all niches will be as simple as bodybuilding to find the real authority sites. You’re not going to find authority hemorrhoid site. They don’t exist. Well, I don’t think they exist. You’ll have to aim in a different direction hitting up authority health sites related to constipation or something that is similar.

Propositioning

Now that you got their emails you have to send them a message and presuade them to do this. If there is a piece of information that copywriting has taught me it is that you have to start EARLY into the benefits for the reader (ie: authority site owner).

I’m not going to give you a template for you to copy. You have to learn to do this yourself.

Your subject line has to be something that they’ll actually read. That doesn’t mean spamming up a hype like subject. Just something honest that they’ll read. The very first sentence of the email should list the benefit. If you haven’t been paying attention the benefit is a high quality article on their site. Communicate that fact without hype and without displaying your benefit (a link back to your site).

Here is a rough example…

Hello,

I wanted to know whether you’d like some high quality articles for your website. I’m a *authority in the niche* and I can produce some very honest articles. My perspective can be a very valuable asset to your readers and can help you bring in a lot more search engine traffic. All I ask in return for free quality articles is that I get an author box for exposure.

Let me know if you’d be interested in such a thing.

Thanks,

Name

That’s a very simple and to the point email. It follows a very simple pattern. Opening sentence talks about the big benefit for the authority site.  I mention after that reasons why I can provide that benefit to their readers. I follow up with some secondary benefits (good stuff for the readers and search traffic). I finally end with my author box. It’s sort of like a sales page. I write about the benefits and I end it with the price, which is just an author box. And that cost is very minimal.

You can always add more to it, but I always advise short emails. I’m a busy guy and wouldn’t read a long email. Just get to the point. You can add another sentence after the ‘let me know’ sentence that says, “In the next few days I’m going to prepare for you a 1000 word quality article for you to see exactly what I can give you.” That takes away buying pressure.

I have had nothing, but great comments from people that are interested. If you can, try to add in something unique points about the site. For example, the first person to email me back was the most receptive. There site didn’t really have articles on it. They just had a directory listing for every single authority person in the niche. I just added in an extra sentence after I mention the articles, “I know that your site is a directory of information on *niche* people, but I think having quality articles can give more to your readers.” They replied back immediately to that email thanking me and thinking that I was right.

I wrote a 1200 word article for them that they liked. The big selling point for that person was the benefit of the article, but I was able to show them that I was looking at their site and I was giving them genuine advice on how to improve it.

Writing the Articles

There needs to be a lot more care put into these articles. Unlike EZA, the owners of these sites (for the most part) know their niche and they can smell bullshit articles. You really do have to develop a quality article here. Remember, it might take you a few hours to make one, but that’s okay. The benefit you’re receiving is a kick ass link.

Think of it this way. If you can only get 1 kick ass article done a day, which results in 1 authority backlink than you’re kicking ass. It just takes a few authority links and your site will skyrocket. One authority link will outdo hundreds of article directory links, blog comments and link wheels.

Take the extra time to write something good. Go through it and make sure that it sounds correct. If an article directory rejects your article you can always submit again. With authority sites you may not have another chance, so make sure you don’t screw it up.

You may feel intimidated that you have to produce this content, but it shouldn’t be hard. All you have to do is put more time into it. Time is all it takes to produce a great piece of content.

There is a little more that needs to be done though. It’s not enough to write information on your niche, but it has to be something that the site owner wants. For example, lets say that your niche is bodybuilding. If the authority site has several articles on how to get six pack abs than he probably doesn’t want an article on the same subject.

You should take a look through their content. See what they have, and more importantly, what they don’t have.

Another aspect I learned in copywriting is the Unique Selling Point (USP). It’s the way that you differentiate yourself from others. Lets go back to the bodybuilding example. I’m not saying that you can’t write about six pack abs. You can do it if your article has a unique selling point. When I say USP I don’t mean selling, but something that makes it different than the other articles on the site. For example, if the articles on this site were about getting abs from doing unique crunches than write an article on how to get abs without doing any exercise. This is a rough example, but you have to get them something unique or it is just useless to them.

Also, you have to consider where your article is going. I noticed a lot of authority sites have their own little section to put articles. This means that you can write nice long pieces of content. But if the site owner is going to put it on a blog than you’re going to have to write it differently. I know that I’ve been writing monster posts for my site (an experiment), but most blogs are looking for something easier to read.

That’s not to say that you have to write something short, but the type of content you write is different. You might have to do a post like the “Top 5 Reasons to …” where you bold each reason as you write about it. It’s something that is much easier to read, especially for blog readers. I’m not saying that a site owner wouldn’t appreciate a long detailed article, but let’s make it as easy as we can for them to please their readers.

A Few More Resources

While doing some of these searches for authority sites I noticed that a lot of them already accept articles to begin with. Obviously they’re going to be picky as hell though. But the fact that they list this shows you that you can get one accepted. It means they are already open to the idea of taking content from others and they know how the game works.

All this means is that you can carefully prepare your article and submit it to them when you’re ready. It’s not rocket science. There is no reason to reject a quality article that benefits their visitors.

Finding these sites are really easy at Google. Just type in: Niche +”Submit Articles”

You can change the variation from submit articles to whatever you think  a site would list. I’m not saying that every site that comes up will be an authority in the niche. You have to remember that this is going to be a targeted backlink from a niche related site. This should count higher than a link from a article directory.

But I have one more place for you to look: niche related article directories. I want to emphasize that this is the lowest on all the backlinks I’ve listed today, but I still think there is more value to them. They are still niche related and I think it makes a much better link in the eyes of Google.

Finding niche related article directories is the same as above (Niche +”submit articles”). You can also search variations of that. The most common directory software should have variables you can search. You’re going to get a lot of general directories this way, but just go through them. You’ll find some niche related ones.

Conclusion

I thought I should sum this all up for those of you that aren’t interested in reading this massive post. EZA is a business that has its own prerogative. Actually it’s prerogative is to our detriment. The harder we work, the less we market and the less we make is good for EZA. Isn’t good for us.

It’s not a matter of adapting to Ezinearticles new rules because that’s no guarantee in itself. Normally when they changed rules the old articles on the site were fine. That’s not the case anymore. They’re going through our old articles right now and they’re taking them off the site. Even if you bust your balls today writing an article that gets accepted, it doesn’t mean that it won’t be rejected in 6 months time.

You’re a business. Your job is to make money. You have to work with others to make that money, but there’s a point where you can’t put up with the demands and bitching from another person. You want work with people that want to see both succeed. Despite what EZA says, they really hate us. And the less we make, the better off they are. That isn’t a good partnership for me.

The good news is that you can put your work to more productive use. There are tons of authority sites in your niche that would gladly link back to you. Just write a nice high quality article for them. It’s easier than you think.

Just contact them by email. The worst you’re going to get is a reply that says “no”. Some won’t even reply. But you’ll probably get a few emails like I did of excited site owners just dying for your content. Remember, you don’t have to get all the authority sites to link to you. Just one or two links is enough for you to jump to the top spot of Google.

Why bust your balls day after day writing articles for EZA for very little link juice? Write one high quality article a day for a week and give it to each authority site in your niche and you’re set. 

Seriously, this is so easy. I can’t believe that I was actually intimidated doing this in the past. The fact is that most people are intimidated. Some of these site owners I emailed have sites that are 12 years old and they’re excited to hear from me. They haven’t even had someone reach out and send them an email.

Trust me. You won’t regret doing this. Though I’m sure 99% of my readers will never ever try it. Remember, it just takes one or two authority backlinks to send you to the top of the search engines.

I guess the first thing to point out is that there has been about a 20% decline in overall impressions with Adsense. I think this is mainly due to some of my sites finally going through the Google dance process. It is a little annoying, but I guess it’s just part of the game. Even though I had a reduction in my impressions I still manage to earn more week over week so far, which is obviously a good sign. That means I’m making more on average per click. Frankly, I’d rather make money online with less traffic and more per click, than getting into a volume business. I also had a few interesting clicks so far from one of my new sites. It had a nice $2.41 click. I have to say that I love this kind of click value.

I’ve been creating much more Amazon sites this wave though. I think my paranoia with Adsense is starting to influence me. I don’t want to get too much vested interest in Adsense, but the good thing about websites is that I can always change things around when I want too.

The Advantages of Managing A Lot of Sites

I thought that it would be a little interesting to help show you the benefits and advantages to having a project with 41 sites to manage (not to mention all my other sites that). Maybe some of my readers are thinking that this is a little too much for them. I suppose it could be a little too much for many people. I never before had to manage this many sites before. With my June Project and my August Project I managed 8 sites at a time and I thought that this was really a max for the amount of sites I could actively work on at one time.

I was did wrong with that assumption and it really only limited me in ways. I guess everyone should take on this work on one level to see how far you can push yourself. But anyway, here are the benefits you can get from having all these sites up…

Less Mental Masturbation

The term mental masturbation was something I came up to describe when you get stuck in that unproductive state of checking stats all day long. I trust me, I like to check my stats. I like seeing the sales come in. I like seeing the traffic of conquering a keyword. The only problem with this behavior is that it’s a huge waste of your fuckin’ time. Checking your stats will not make money for you.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that stats don’t have value. Viewing them in a constructive manner and a designated time for research purposes/tweaking is a good thing. It is going to make you more profitable. If you’re looking at your stats instead of pounding out content, building backlinks and doing all that other work than you’re just mentally masturbating.

And mental masturbation extends beyond the point of statistics too. If you’re going to forums and constantly searching through new threads than you’re wasting your time. There are no hidden gems to discover on forums. No one is going to post the big secret for making big money, so stop wasting your fuckin’ time. It’s time to start avoiding forums.

Oh I should also point out something about forums. The people that seem to have the most posts are the guru/respected people, yet if they’re making all these posts how the fuck are they making money. They’re trolling the forum all fuckin’ day long. I’m saying that a high post count is necessarily bad. If you have several thousand posts that is fine if you’ve been a member for 5 years. But I see people yapping on the Warrior forum with 15,000 posts and I just feel like telling them to shut the fuck up.

And that’s another thing now that I think about it. For some odd reason, the posts that are real popular that have a very diverse crowd of people commenting on it (praising) are the posts that have the most inane over simplified “self-help” feel goodery type of post. These are the posts that contain absolutely nothing good in value. It’s mainly vague shit and makes you feel good. Advice like “don’t work hard, work smart”. Oh wow. That’s revolutionary. “provide good content”, oh absolutely magical. I swear to God if I had to moderate a forum I’d crack my skull open on the corner of my desk in frustration.

You Have to Build Links Slowly

People say that the best SEO is the slow link building over time. I can say that I definitely rushed my link building efforts with some sites. Even with my August project I thought maybe I went a little nuts and that could explain why my sites were ranking.

I have 41 sniper sites to juggle now. There’s no way that I can build links fast. They will all be slow because it just takes too much time to do them all. One article back link is 41 unique articles. That takes time. Even though I could definitely do that in a day, it’s not something that I could do day after day. I’m basically stuck building things nice and slow, which will happen over months. This should allow search engines to view the sites as much more natural and more deserving of top spots, which helps to make money online.

It’s just harder to be a “professional webmaster” when you have so many damn sites to manage. You can add 10 pages of content to your sites in one day, which Google will obviously see. I don’t know if they’ll necessarily view that as negative, but they will see it. You can only do so much at a time and that is actually an advantage to you.

I’m More Productive

I just get more done this way. I can explain this to you in a very logical manner because there is an actual psychological trick to it that makes you productive. I need to get my sites up in a fast manner because I want them to index and start the marination process. This is pressure. Basically the sooner I get things built, the sooner things can sit. And we all know that SEO takes time and we can’t escape it. I try to pound out as much content as possible and at least from a starting point my first links built are pretty fast too.

I don’t know how other people will manage this kind of stress. I know that it pushes me to get more work done and do more.

There is also the added benefit of not waiting around. I suppose this could deserve a new sub heading, but it sort of fits into this one. You basically run out of time. If you build one site, you put it up online, build a few links and than you sit around waiting. We all seen new people do it too. They come to a forum and they ask questions about why their site has indexed and it’s only been like 2 days. What they should be doing is working on something else. You can’t sit around and wait for your site to produce results.

The position you want to be in is one where you’re too busy working. You’re working your but off trying to make money online and than one day you get this large check in the mail. You have to dig through your accounts and figure out where the hell it came from. Or you log into your Adsense account after a month of not checking and seeing that you’re pulling in $50/day. This is what success comes from. It comes from busting your balls instead of waiting for a site to get successful.

With 41 sites I don’t have time to even check my daily traffic stats. There’s just too much time and frankly too many stats to go through.

More Extremely Successful Sites

The thing about this business is that sites are hit and miss. I’m not saying a miss won’t make you money, but you’re going to do your work and soon you’ll have sites. As you grow them you’ll end up with sites that just seem to make a lot more money.  When it comes to advance internet marketing you’re going to pick up the fact that if you have a lot of sites out there you’re going to at least hit some that pull in awesome earnings. Obviously the more sites that you have under your belt, the more experience you get and you become better at identifying what will work and what won’t. The issue is that you never know if something will work with no matter how much research you do. You could go after a keyword you think is weak and never get it. You could get it, but it doesn’t convert. Whatever it is, some sites won’t perform regardless of how well you do things. Just as some will out perform your expectations.

Basically if you keep plugging away at this type of sites and keep making them, you’re going to eventually hit one that is going to produce a lot of money. For example, one of my newer sites is shaping out to be one of those sites with nice earnings. Obviously the real earnings will come when I move from position 10 to something in the top 3, but I’m getting good results so far. I’m making well over a dollar per click. If I was to get 100 visitors a day and a 5% CTR, I would make over $5/day for that site. That’s with a crappy 5% CTR. You can see the possibilities considering that the keyword can get 10,000 searches a month.

More Learning, More Experience, More Testing

This is something that is very important. The first inevitability that you have to accept is that the more that you try, the more that you learn. This is all about experience. It’s okay to make sites that don’t go anywhere. If you try something and you don’t get any results than you’re just a little bit wiser. Out of these 41 sites that I bought for this project, how many of them will fail miserably? I don’t know, but I’m sure there will be some that do suck.

The point is that the more sites I have, the more information I can take in about them. With this information I can conclude on better techniques that I should be applying and become a much better internet marketer.

Testing is also an important thing to do. You have to be always testing. Even with this site right now I’ve been testing lately with very long posts because I want to know that it works. The problem is that you can’t test with one site. There are really a lot of variables that you can’t control. You can’t control the search engines. You can’t control your volume of traffic. You can’t control the niches. You could test something on one site and get something completely different on another site. The point of testing on multiple sites is that you can get an average.

For example, you can look at indexing times. You can’t just test two different sites with two different methods to see which one works better. That’s not good enough. Pick up 41 sites and try a few different methods. Group them up in 10′s and try a method on each group of 10. Whatever ends up doing the best will probably be the one with the best method.

I can do the same thing with templates. I can test templates across a lot of different sites and see what I get for click through rates. I can figure things out this way by having test results. This is how you get better. You have more sites, you get more experience, you test and figure out what works (and what doesn’t).

Research

You have to understand how important all these sites are for research. Obviously having successful sites are good, but the bigger advantage is that you can build on those successes with new sites. Like, let’s say you had a site that was dedicated to plastic dog houses (I don’t know if that is a good keyword, just throwing it out there). Let’s say that this is a really good site that you easily ranked for and are making pretty good money with.

This tells you that this is a niche that has money and that it also has the traffic. This means you can move onto other related keywords in the niche. You can grab wood dog house, custom dog house, etc. You know what is working in one area and you can spread out to dominate the entire niche. This works good. Often times you’ll be selling the same thing, but you just slowly take over the niche and make money online. This is how the game is played.

Other pieces of golden nuggets that you can find is long tail traffic. You’d be surprised at how much actual things you’ll rank for. Like I said with my most successful SEO’ed site. I went for a modest keyword and started ranking for one that got searched 10k a month. I can easily pick up a domain with that new keyword and rank. I can slowly fill up the top 10 with an empire of my sites, rule the fuckin’ niche and make money.

That’s the real value here. You have all these sites out there and you know the niches that are converting. The niches you can easily rank for. The niches that I can dominate and take over. The more piece of online real estate you have, the more power you have.

Proof Keywords in Domain Name COUNT!

The evidence continues to pile up showing how important having the keyword in your domain name. I’m not saying that you have to have the keyword in the domain name to rank. I’m absolutely not saying that at all. It is pretty obvious that you don’t need it. You  can rank for many great keywords with random letters in the domain name, but doing proper on page SEO and getting the right backlinks.

What I’m trying to say is that having the keyword in the domain name makes it so much easier. And I have proof. Basically my oldest site, has struggled to rank for a specific keyword. It doesn’t contain the keyword in the domain (I bought it before I learned about keyword research) and it has a lot of quality backlinks. A new site I bought in the August Project is ranking for only a fraction of the links and the links are crap. Every single one of the keywords are crap.

We’re talking about a site that is around 3 years old. Has a ton of backlinks, with many coming from authority sites, but doesn’t contain a keyword in the domain name. While this new site has been around for 2 months, has crappy link directory backlinks, yet out performs.

Why? Because the words in your domain name count. If I start a business like Make Cash Online Inc. I’m going to buy a domain name that reflects that business name. Corporate websites don’t necessarily have the most text on it and they definitely don’t have a high amount of backlinks, but when people search for that name they expect to get businesses website.

Google and other search engines can’t tell the differences between some keyword and even if they could, how will they know it isn’t a business. It can’t tell the difference if Make Cash Online is a keyword or a business name. It could be both. The business could of been selected based on the fact that it has a high search popularity. By default, search engines have to apply value to the keyword and a decent amount of it. It doesn’t matter if someone is gaming the system like we are. They have to apply it because they have a loyality to the people that search and if I search a business name, I expect it to come up. End of story.

All this means is that if you’re going to buy a domain name it has to contain a keyword. I don’t care if you’re buying a product and calling it the Magic Cure, you’re going to get a keyword domain name. You can brand with the domain name, you get the easy traffic . It’s not the be all end all of this thing. You can rank without it, but save yourself all this extra work.

Does Monster Content Pages Work Better?

Well, I don’t have an answer to this question so far, but I finally had Google update the site it has indexed for a site that ranks pretty well. Traffic has jumped up around 22% over the week. I don’t know if that is just the new fresh content or not. I’ll still have to wait to see what kind of results I get with other sites with this little experiment.

I think it’s also important to note that I didn’t lose any of my search engine positions with completely different content. Everything is holding, but things my go up or down in the future. We’ll have to watch that closely.

Obviously with this site I’m testing too, but it’s a little more difficult with this site because I I haven’t built backlinks. I decided that I’m going to try and slowly build some over time. I’m not going nuts. I’m not interested in seeing my page become a power house or anything. I just need enough leverage, so I can see whether this stuff is working.

There is no answer yet, but we are testing. We are seeing traffic and it might be working.

How did the Snipers go this week?

Well, like I said before that my impression count was down around 20% week over week, which is due to some Google dancing. I guess this was pretty standard and I was waiting for this to happen and it finally did. I’m sure things will bounce back, but the time it will take to happen is something I don’t know. It could be something that is back in a week or it might take a month. I don’t think it really matters since I got too much work on my plate right now.

Total Invested: $354.20 US

Total Return: $42.75 US ( $18.58 since last week )

I made more than I did the previous week even though I had around 20% less impressions for the week. I think I did about $15 last week, which doubled the week before it. I didn’t double it this week, but it is growing. When things finally even out after the Google Dance, than I can really make cash online.

The key here is that your visitors are going to build the SEO content and they’re never even going to know how.

Check it out

Looking at this page should give you enough information for what I’m talking about. Basically you want to have a search box for people to search your site. You’re not necessarily doing this for the sake of them finding content, but merely to build a dynamic page for their search.

You’ll notice that when you do a search it will go to it’s own unique URL (/search/the-text-you-searched/). That page is now permanent. Back on the search page you can see a list of the searches, with links to the unique pages. This is so search engines can spider and index them.

You’ll also noticed that the listed search results also have a number in brackets. That’s to illustrate that if something is searched more than once it will be counted. Obviously you have no reason to share that information with regular users. I’m just showing it to illustrate that I’m counting. What you can do is make a 4122.php (or whatever you want to call it) file and access that on your own to view a list of the counts. That means you have your own proven keyword research, which is good.

Building This

The logic here is really quite simple. A very simple database is needed here.

ID auto_increment
Search varchar 100
Perma varchar 100
Count int

Basically you want to store the actual searched text. You also want to create a perma link address and store that too. If someone searches “How is that?”, your perma should look like “how-is-that”. Everything that isn’t needed should be stripped.

When you’re checking a search against the database, search against the Perma values. There can be slight variations in lower/upper case letters and punctuation. Just search the Perma and if there is a match, increment the count.

The Result Page

Your actual result page can be customized anyway you want to be. Typically you’ll want it to look like your normal page, so users at least think they’re on the same site. As you can see from my example pages, there isn’t anything there. Don’t do that, I’m just giving the basic shell of what this search thing should do.

First off, you do not need to show any decent search results. Obviously, the less dynamic the content of the page, the less likely Google will like it. That’s not to say that long tail keywords won’t get traffic because they will, but the more competitive words will not get any love.

There are few things you can try…

1. You can make a table on your database that is for affiliate links. You just basically you need ID, Affiliate Link, Title and Summary for the table. You can add in as much of them as possible and when someone searches you can use these as the results. It’s your choice if you randomly choose the top three of them or if you search the links for something related.

2. If you have a blog you can always search against that database. You can put an affiliate link first result and list related blog posts as the rest of the results and you can even give a little summary of the text. Now, I’m not going into the algorithms of searching a database. There are obviously smart ways to do this mathematically and stupid ways. I don’t care how you do it. All I know is that having different results showing up with 100 characters of the blog post showing up as a summary, you’re going to end up with a pretty unique looking page in the eyes of Google.

This is all you have to do. It is as simple as it gets to creating dynamic SEO that you don’t have to worry about. Your users will build your site every time they take a search. Not to mention the fact that you have access to actual search data, which you can use.